I Woke Up as the Villainess Fated to Die, and Now the Emperor Can't Forget Me novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Last Chapter
I die in a crosswalk reading the villainess's execution and wake up as her, pouring poison into the heroine's cup with the Emperor watching, so I drink it myself and fall into his arms as he asks who did this to me.
The last chapter of Forbidden Rose was the one where they cut off Vivi's head.
I was reading it in a crosswalk when the truck hit me.
It was ten past eleven on a Thursday.
I was twenty-four, and I had just finished a twelve-hour shift processing car insurance claims.
The bus had dropped me two blocks from my apartment, and I couldn't wait two blocks.
Chapter 212 had been posted at eleven sharp.
I had followed that book for three years.
I knew it better than I knew my own family.
The light was green for me.
I stepped off the curb with my thumb on the screen.
"Lady Vivi Montclair was led up the cathedral steps in a white shift, barefoot, her red hair hacked short by the guards."
I hated Vivi.
Everyone who read that book hated Vivi.
She poisoned Rose at the Midsummer Banquet in chapter one.
She cut Rose's saddle at the royal hunt.
She pushed Rose into the palace lake in front of the whole court.
And in the end she tried to stab Rose on the day Rose was crowned Empress.
"The Emperor did not look away when the blade fell," I read.
I stopped in the middle of the road.
Then I heard the horn.
I looked up into two white headlights and the grille of a delivery truck that hadn't stopped for its light.
My phone flew out of my hand.
The last thing I saw was the screen spinning through the air, still lit.
Then there were violins.
The smell of wax candles and roasted meat and some heavy flower perfume.
I was standing up.
My fingers were cold.
I looked down.
My hand was stretched over a golden cup full of dark red wine, and between my fingers was a tiny green glass vial.
It was tipped sideways.
A single clear drop was hanging from its lip.
I knew that vial.
Thumb-sized green glass, with a silver stopper stamped with a hawk.
The Montclair crest.
My hand jerked back so fast the drop fell on the tablecloth instead of the wine.
I stared at my own arm.
It was wrapped in emerald silk to the wrist.
There were rings on my fingers, heavy gold ones, and my nails were long and painted red.
These were not my hands.
A strand of hair fell over my shoulder.
It was dark red.
I lifted my eyes.
A long hall stretched out in front of me, lit by a thousand candles in iron wheels on the ceiling.
A raised dais at the far end, with one high chair on it.
A man was sitting in that chair.
He had gold hair and a black coat and he wasn't talking to anyone.
He was looking straight at me.
I knew who he was before I knew anything else.
Emperor Ceasar Aurelian.
The man who would watch my head come off and not look away.
This was the Midsummer Banquet.
This was chapter one.
And I was Vivi.
Lady Vivi Montclair was twenty-two, the Duke's only daughter, and the most hated woman in the book.
A girl laughed softly beside me.
"Lady Vivi? Are you all right? You've gone so pale."
I turned my head.
She was small and slender, with pale blonde hair loose down her back and huge blue eyes.
She wore a plain pink dress with no jewels at all.
Rose Delmar.
The heroine.
Twenty-one years old and the sweetest girl in the empire, according to two hundred and twelve chapters.
She was reaching for the golden cup in front of me.
Her cup.
In the book she drank it in one long swallow and toasted the Emperor.
Then she fainted, and he came down from the dais and carried her out of the hall in front of everyone.
That was how he fell in love with her.
And that was the first thing anyone ever held against Vivi.
The vial was still in my fist.
I couldn't tell how much had already gone into the wine.
There was a thin oily shimmer turning on the surface.
Enough, then.
Rose's fingers closed around the stem.
"Shall we toast His Majesty together?" she said.
"No," I said.
It came out in a voice I didn't know, low and clear and cold.
Rose blinked at me.
Up on the dais, the Emperor set down his own cup.
He was still watching.
If Rose drank it, I was dead in two hundred and eleven chapters.
If I knocked it over, every lady at this table would remember that Vivi Montclair spilled Rose's wine the second she reached for it.
Someone would find the vial in my sleeve.
I took the cup out of Rose's hand.
"You're too slow," I said. "I'll drink first."
I tipped it back and swallowed all of it.
It was sweet, and under the sweetness it tasted like licking a coin.
The hall had gone quiet around our table.
"Lady Vivi," Rose whispered. "That was mine."
I set the empty cup down.
My hand missed the table by an inch.
The cup rang off the floor and rolled.
The candles above me stretched into long gold streaks.
My knees didn't belong to me anymore.
I remembered the book's exact words for it.
Widow's sleep. Three days in the dark.
Somebody screamed.
I was falling, and the floor never came.
Two arms caught me.
They were hard as iron, and they smelled like cold air and leather.
I forced my eyes open.
Gold hair. A hard jaw. A thin white scar cutting through one eyebrow.
Gold-brown eyes, very close to mine.
The Emperor had come down from the dais.
He had crossed the whole hall.
He was holding me exactly the way he was supposed to hold Rose.
"Lady Montclair," he said.
His voice was quiet, and the whole room heard it.
"Look at me. Who did this to you?"
I looked at him.
The vial was digging into my palm under my sleeve.
The answer was me.
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